Fear the reaper.

Department of Energy; MuckrockIn what is basically a 30 Rock episode come to life, the federal Department of Energy designed and purchased a mascot costume to warn children about the dangers of environmental catastrophe—and to haunt their dreams, apparently.

Thanks to a FOIA request from journalist Emma Best, the details of which were published this week at Muckrock, we now know a bit more about the history of the Green Reaper—a verdant version of the Grim Reaper that manages to combine the ominous presence of the original with the vacant eyes of a cartoon character. While the mascot seems best suited to shatter children's innocence by informing them about the inevitabilty of their own deaths, the documents show that the Green Reaper, which was designed in 2012, was intended to be used in "community outreach presentations to local elementary school children" and in internal memos reminding government workers to conserve energy and carpool when possible.

One of the most terrifying details in the FOIA'd documents is the claim that—in addition to making appearences at schools—the Green Reaper shows up "randomly" at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Um, no thank you.

The Green Reaper costume cost about $5,000 to manufacture, but the documents provided to Muckrock don't give a full accounting of how much time public employees spent brainstorming and designing it. Regardless, the government liked the design so much that Dawn Starett, the program manager who invented the Green Reaper, won a 2013 Environmental Stewardship Award from the NNSA for it.

For a government agency that sounds so important—according to its website, the National Nuclear Security Administration "maintains and enhances the safety, security, reliability, and performance of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile"—it's probably right to wonder whether building creepy mascots and handing out internal awards is really the best use of public resources. (The NNSA also trademarked the character's name and costume, which is a real shame, because Green Reaper would be killer branding for a marijuana start-up.)

On the bright side, squeezing that much existential terror out of a mere $5,000 is pretty damn efficient for government work.

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There's Kzanol, the one-eyed coercive telepath from Larry Niven's World of Ptaavs. With the CNN amplifier helmet in place it could order everything on the planet EXCEPT communist China to shut down its power plants and DIE! If not for government-school illiteracy now prevailing, this could have been as good an avatar as the Integralist Green Kharon looter government econazis picked out.

But the universe requires someone to work in order for you to get your breakfast and its so unfair that *you* should have to work for your breakfast (instead of forcing someone else to do it) and that's all your employer's fault for 'exploiting the situation'.

The Green death of warmunist altruism is a perfect poster ghoul. Ecological National Socialism is as altruistic and collectivist a religion as the Christian National Socialism that took root in 1933 Germany thanks to its 97% Catholic and Protestant electorate. While Hitler, Mussolini and Franco were the rage in Europe, Green-shirt Integralistas were are again the Brazilian mirror image of Spanish, French and Portuguese catholicism's rejection of Jewish Liberal Denier separation of Infallible Pope and Omnipotent State. The Anti-Industrial Revolution could not ask for a more fitting Avatar. A summation symbol would be the perfect chest swastika for symbolizing this One World Carbon Tax People's State.